Reading novels again, are we? That’s increasingly a girl thing, it seems. There’s an interesting profile in a recent New Yorker magazine of the British novelist Ian McEwan. In it McEwan tells of the time he and his son took thirty novels, culled from his home library, to a London park and tried to give them to passersby. According to McEwan, “[E]very young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book,” but the men “… could not be persuaded.” McEwan concluded that “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.” Maybe the solution is to serialize novels on beer cans.

Meanwhile, back at your question, the answer is yes, “doing the Dutch” is indeed slang for suicide, also known as “the Dutch act,” which is obviously unfair to the Dutch. If, as a nation, the Dutch really had an extraordinary predilection for suicide, the Netherlands wouldn’t be nearly so crowded. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of anti-Dutch slurs in the English language.

A survey of the wide range of pejorative terms in English that include the word “Dutch” would lead one to conclude that there is scarcely an unpleasant aspect of human existence that has not been unfairly ascribed to the Dutch by English-speaking people. Most of these terms are relics of the fierce competition between the English and the Dutch in the 17th century, when the countries were establishing rival global empires. According to Hugh Rawson, who devotes almost three pages of his wonderful book “Wicked Words” (Crown, 1989) to the linguistic products of anti-Dutch fervor in the Britain of that period, almost anything viewed as “inferior,” “abnormal” or “foreign” was labeled “Dutch.” Many of these locutions lasted well past the period of hostility between the two nations, and some are still heard today.

“Dutch courage,” for example, is false bravado, often fortified by large amounts of alcohol. A “Dutch treat” is a dinner or similar occasion where no one is “treated” and everyone pays his or her own way. “Dutch nightingale” was, at one time, mocking slang for a frog. To “speak Dutch” was to speak gibberish or nonsense, and something completely incomprehensible was described as “double-Dutch.” (“Double Dutch” jump rope is so-called because it is difficult and confusing, requiring hopping through two jump ropes twirling in opposite directions like an eggbeater.) A “Dutch defense” was a sham defense to mask a retreat, and to “do a Dutch” meant to run away as well as to commit suicide. To “take Dutch leave” was to desert, and today we still describe someone in trouble as being “in Dutch.”

Interestingly, some of these unpleasant creations crossed the Atlantic and were used in America, not because there was much Dutch presence here (apart from in early New York City), but because German immigrants to America were known as “Dutch” due to a common misunderstanding of “Deutsch” (meaning “German” in German) as meaning “Dutch.” To this day the descendants of German immigrants in Pennsylvania are known as “the Pennsylvania Dutch.”